Colonel Wedgwood has done a most useful piece of work
in compiling the Parliamentary history of the county and boroughs of Staffordshire from 1608 to 1832, with compact biographies of all the members. The local and personal details are of great interest and value, especially for the eighteenth century when personalities counted for more than principles. Much light, for instance, is thrown on the Duke of Bedford's faction—the " Bloomsbury gang "—by Colonel Wedgwood's account of the electoral methods of the Cowers and Ansons, Bedford's powerful allies in Staffordshire. They controlled Lichfield by creating forty-shilling annuities secured on a freehold ; the annuitants were technically free- holders and could be brought up to the poll when the Whigs feared for their majority. At Newcastle-under-Lyme the
Dowers bought up the house-property and allowed their tenants to get ten or fifteen years in arrear with their rents, provided that they voted the right way. At Tamworth all ratepayers could vote and exact their price from •the neigh- bouring magnates, the Townshends and the Thynnes. The county was only once contested between 1715 and 1832 ; the rule was that one member was a Tory and the other a Gower. Dr. Johnson's Toryism was typical of his native shire and city. Colonel Wedgwood prints a lively account of
a Tory and Jacobite tumult in 1747 at Lichfield, provoked by the wholesale corruption' of the Cowers and Ansons who,
according to a contemporary witness, spent £20,000 in winning an election at which 508 voters in all went to the poll. The book is admirably indexed. Similar compilations for other counties are much needed.
Previous page
